Geothermal has long been the clean, firm power source that was always a few breakthroughs away from being cheap enough to matter. Numbers buried in a Nevada utility filing suggest that day may have arrived.
Joel Edwards, co-founder and CTO of geothermal developer Zanskar, put it bluntly earlier this month: "to all the geothermal believers out there, the flippening has come."
to all the geothermal believers out there, the flippening has come in NV Energy’s 2026 filing, 3 geothermal offers came in at $105–107/MWh, below the ~$114/MWh capacity-weighted average for 11 solar + bess offers in Nevada, of all the sunny places the 3 solar + bess projects NV Energy put forward in 2024 averaged ~$94/MWh, but this 2026 slate is pricier, e.g., Boulder Solar III’s levelized price jumped from ~$85/MWh to ~$125/MWh after permitting delays, land carrying costs, higher financing costs, and, of course, big, bad tariffs. could geothermal pull off a solar + wind circa 2010 move and scale faster to come down the cost curve? it now has a much longer tax-credit runway than new solar + wind projects (oh how the tables have turned), plus firm output and higher energy density (all true for nuclear too) and for the 24/7 solar crowd: the ~$114/MWh average covers solar paired mostly with 4-hour batteries, and we all know 12+ hours of storage would cost more and still wouldn’t cover multi-day gaps it might be time for more geothermal, people
— Joel Edwards (@joelhedwards) October 7, 2026
In NV Energy's 2026 res
